Comments on: The great separationhttp://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2007/12/07/the-great-separation/
Secularism, religion, and the public sphereSat, 28 Feb 2015 16:48:44 +0000hourly1By: Mark Lillahttp://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2007/12/07/the-great-separation/comment-page-1/#comment-27
Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:53:30 +0000http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2007/12/07/the-great-separation/#comment-27While I’m very grateful to José Casanova for taking the time to write this thoughtful and generous contribution, it places me in the uncomfortable position of having to say that it significantly distorts my intentions, which apparently weren’t clear enough in the book. I plan to post my own contribution to “The Immanent Frame” later, but it’s important now to confront some misunderstandings (which some print reviewers, I’m sorry to say, have also expressed).

First, and foremost, I need to say that The Stillborn God is not about secularism, secularization, or “the secular.” These terms do not appear in it, except in the introduction, when I express some skepticism about how they are presently used, particularly in European debates. I have no desire to express myself about “the secular age” for the simple reason that I don’t think we live in one, for the even simpler reason that human beings don’t live in “ages” about which they can say anything intelligible. Retrospectively, perhaps, or as dusk falls, but not in the present. As I put it in the book, this is fairy-tale talk, a futile attempt to make the present intelligible by connecting it to some fantasy or other about the past. Those wishing to swim in those Hegelian waters are welcome to paddle away, but I prefer to stay on land.

Second, The Stillborn God is about ideas and does not pretend to offer “a historical narrative of the actual transformation of political institutions in early modern Europe.” José Casanova quite rightly points to all the complications and nuances such a narrative would have to consider – including the paradoxical confessionalization and territorialization of the European state following the wars of religion. For better or worse, I am interested in the structure of ideas, how they hang together logically and psychologically (rarely the same thing), and not in narrative history.

Third, the main subject of The Stillborn God is political theology, its nature, structure, and attraction. Political theology has its own intellectual rules, depending on the assumptions it makes about the divine, and in the book I briefly explore how the distinctive problems of Christian political theology developed (logically) out of the assumptions it made. From there I examine Hobbes’s turn to religious anthropology, and how some later modern thinkers worked within his anti-Christian framework to – surprisingly – develop a liberal political theology. The perceived failure of this liberalism occasioned a return to a modern messianic political theology, which bears strong structural resemblance to the gnostic heresies of the early church. The rebirth of such an intellectual tendency tells us a lot about how political theology in general operates – or at least that is my conclusion.

José Casanova thinks this is a “pure analytic construct,” and to that I do plead guilty. The Stillborn God assumes an exhaustive analytic distinction between those political doctrines that appeal ultimately to divine revelation to legitimize the exercise of public authority, and those doctrines that make no such appeal. Many civilizations, perhaps most in history, have operated under some kind of political theology; others have not. The modern West no longer does, though its reigning assumptions about public authority have much to do with the polemic struggle over Christian political theology. This is what I mean by the Great Separation: it was something that happened in the West when a new way was found, following Hobbes, to legitimate that authority without any appeal to revelation. Medieval Christian thinking about the separation of powers never made this last, fateful step, and so never left the ambit of political theology. That is why, to understand that thinking, we first must learn to make this basic analytic distinction.

José Casanova has made a number of other, very interesting points that I look forward to taking up in my own subsequent post. But for now I simply wanted to restate the intentions, however imperfectly realized, of The Stillborn God.